Professional Development Event Attracts SRO Audience

It was standing room only at the second event in our Leading the Conversation series on implementing the recommendations in “Turning the Page: Refocusing Massachusetts for Reading Success,” the report we commissioned in 2010 from Nonie Lesaux, Ph.D., a literacy expert at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The February 28 event at The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester focused on designing and implementing professional development programs that support the language and literacy development of children from birth to age 9. The message was clear: Professional development should be ongoing, student-focused, data-driven and linked to practice. (See: Leading the Conversation: Professional development.)

Julie Russ Harris, research manager at HGSE’s Language Diversity and Literacy Development Research Group, opened the morning by noting that too often professional development has been delivered in off-site workshops. She recommended expanding professional development to include early educators, paraprofessionals and health care professionals. She recommended fostering instructional leadership and site-level professional development that aims for continuous improvement. “We need to encourage depth of learning with professional development that is ongoing and intensive,” she said. “It needs to be embedded in a long-term plan.”

A panel of four educators shared their experiences. Doug McNally, a former high school and middle school principal, now directs the Berkshire County Readiness Center, one of six regional centers charged with improving professional development of educators serving children from birth to higher education.

“When I first got into educational professional development, it was one-size-fits-all,” usually delivered in one-day workshops, he said. “You went back to the classroom and rarely implemented what you heard.” Next came individual professional development plans. “The plans I saw were really teacher-centered. They were rarely focused on the needs of the children,” McNally said. “What changed was the introduction of standards-based learning. You get to outcomes-based planning – looking at how children are performing and then differently viewing the teacher’s time with these children…. The paradigm shift was from what do you need to grow professionally to let’s look at students’ data. Let’s look at what your students need and let’s look at this data one more time. It’s not talking about the data to evaluate teachers. That’s threatening. It’s ‘I’m not meeting their needs in this area’ or ‘I could better meet their needs in this area’ and designing professional development around that.”

Barbara Steckel, assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at Lesley University, emphasized “learning how to solve the challenges of daily practice” and the “art” of teaching. She noted the importance of collaboration, observation, feedback and analysis. “We’re fairly good at looking at data and finding trends,” Steckel said. “We’re less good at translating that data into practice.”

Patricia Padilla, principal of the Woodland Academy, a Worcester elementary school, talked of creating a culture of professional development at the innovation school. She described tapping the expertise within the building and enlisting the reading specialist, preschool teacher and speech pathologist to design professional development. The school uses pre-testing and post-testing, as well as classroom observation, weekly grade level meetings and 3½ hour monthly meetings, to determine the effectiveness of instruction. Last year, 82% of Woodland kindergartners completed the year at or above grade level, in stark contrast to earlier years when a majority finished below grade level. “What we’re doing is working,” Padilla said. “It’s not one-shot professional development. This is a continuous process to support our students.”

Janet McKeon has been teaching toddlers at the YWCA of Central Massachusetts since retiring in October 2011 from the Department of Early Education and Care, where she served, among other roles, as associate commissioner of financial assistance and director of policy and training. She described challenges faced by early educators working full-time, then spending evenings pursuing college degrees. “Thankfully,” she said, “most of them are receiving scholarships.” Where general education courses were once taught outside the early childhood curriculum, today, she said, they are often integrated into students’ training. “Now it’s math for early childhood educators,” McKeon said.

Melinda Boone, superintendent of the Worcester Public Schools, stressed the importance of a cradle-to-career perspective and reaching beyond the schools. “Early literacy – birth to third grade – is critical to how we move forward as a nation,” she said. “We have to look at early literacy and early reading from a number of vantage points…. We need to convene the right voices to evolve into an active partnership.”

The February 28 event followed a November event in Cambridge on family engagement. Subsequent events in the Leading the Conversation series will focus on program design and impact (May 2013), assessment (August 2013) and curriculum (November 2013).

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Eye on Early Education focuses on the twin goals of ensuring that Massachusetts children have access to high-quality early education and become proficient readers by the end of third grade.

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Alyssa Haywoode comes to Eye on Early Education after a career in journalism that included writing editorials for the Des Moines Register and Boston Globe. She has written about education, human services, immigration, homelessness, philanthropy and the arts.